First love is but a boy and girl playing at the Cuttle Well with a
bird's egg. They blow it on one summer evening in the long grass, and on
the next it is borne away on a coarse laugh, or it breaks beneath the
burden of a tear. And yet--I once saw an aged woman, a widow of many
years, cry softly at mention of the Cuttle Well. "John was a good man to
you," I said, for John had been her husband. "He was a leal man to me,"
she answered with wistful eyes, "ay, he was a leal man to me--but it
wasna John I was thinking o'. You dinna ken what makes me greet so
sair," she added, presently, and though I thought I knew now I was
wrong. "It's because I canna mind his name," she said.

So the Cuttle Well has its sad memories and its bright ones, and many of
the bright memories have become sad with age, as so often happens to
beautiful things, but the most mournful of all is the story of Aaron
Latta and Jean Myles. Beside the well there stood for long a great pink
stone, called the Shoaging, Stone, because it could be rocked like a
cradle, and on it lovers used to cut their names. Often Aaron Latta and
Jean Myles sat together on the Shoaging Stone, and then there came a
time when it bore these words cut by Aaron Latta:

HERE LIES THE MANHOOD OF AARON LATTA, A FOND SON, A FAITHFUL FRIEND
AND A TRUE LOVER, WHO VIOLATED THE FEELINGS OF SEX ON THIS SPOT, AND IS
NOW THE SCUNNER OF GOD AND MAN

Tommy's mother now heard these words for the first time, Aaron having
cut them on the stone after she left Thrums, and her head sank at each
line, as if someone had struck four blows at her.

The stone was no longer at the Cuttle Well. As the easiest way of